Video cameras are becoming increasing popular for both home and office use. Video is commonly used to document family events such as vacations, weddings, and graduations. In the office, video cameras are used to record presentations and user studies, and are often taken on business trips to record people, places, and meetings. Further, the use of Digital Video (DV), a digital camcorder format, is burgeoning due to the combination of high-quality digital video, inexpensive video capture cards and hard disk drives, and public interest in creating video content for the World Wide Web.
However, the problem is that it is difficult to make use of this video after it has been recorded. While people may view the video they recorded once or twice, it is typically left xe2x80x9cin the bag,xe2x80x9d since interesting portions are often intermixed with longer, less interesting portions. The video is often of poor quality stemming from, for example, abrupt camera movements or video segments that are too long to hold the viewer""s interest. Further, interesting portions may be difficult to find using only fast forward and rewind, particularly when the desired portion is short relative to the rest of the video or when different portions of the video are of interest to different people
While video editing tools exist (e.g., Adobe Premier or In-Sync""s Speed Razor) these tools are quite difficult for an amateur to use. Simpler video editing tools, such as Apple""s iMovie, Ulead Systems"" VideoStudio, or JavuNetwork, make it easy to select video takes and arrange them in a storyboard. However, none of these systems perform video analysis in order to provide intelligent editing assistance. In particular, most of these systems provide no assistance for selecting the in and out points necessary to trim the takes and, thus, a user must manually examine the video on a frame-by-frame basis and manually trim undesirable material from the takes. This task is difficult even with the simpler editing tools.
Accordingly, there is a need for an interactive video creation system for analyzing and composing video that does not require manual selection of the start and end points for each video clip. There is a need for an interactive video creation system that analyzes the video to identify suitable clips and applies a set of heuristic editing rules to automatically determine the start and end points for each clip.
The present invention, roughly described, provides an interactive video creation system for composing videos from recorded video of a video camera that automatically determines the start and end points for each video clip. The system analyzes the video to determine camera motion and speed. Segments of the video, or clips, that are suitable for inclusion in the final video are identified using a plurality of heuristic editing rules, and a keyframe for each suitable clip is displayed to the user in a storyboard interface. The keyframes can then be ordered in any desired sequence. The final output video is created by concatenating the selected clips.
These and other objects and advantages of the invention will appear more clearly from the following detailed description in which the preferred embodiment of the invention has been set forth in conjunction with the drawings.